Page 91 of The Fall
I force my eyes sideways.
His face holds the flat, polished shine of disappointment. His gaze drifts to the glass by my hand, then to me, then back to the glass, where my vodka sweats on the bar.
Condemnation radiates off him in waves. There’s no light in his eyes; they’re cold and hard when they see me.
Everything inside me surges and sags, a tide turning in me. Shame crawls up my neck, burns the tips of my ears. I snap my gaze forward and stare into the clear poison waiting in my glass.
My glass sits there between us, untouched. The ice shifts, clinks against the sides. Such a small sound, but it fills the space between us like thunder.
He takes a swig of his beer and then walks away.
Cool air rushes into the space where his warmth had been, and I’m left staring at my reflection in the mirror. My hand hovers over the glass.
The bartender wipes down the far end, careful not to look my way.
I could drink it. Prove him right. Give him one more reason to write me off.
My hand closes around the glass.
Blair’s retreating shape blurs in the mirror, already leaving, already gone. He’s the man who loved me, who put sunlight in my life, who held me like a lighthouse cradles the night. But he’snot.
Butthisisme. This is every misstep, every stumble, every drop of shame that’s swallowed me. They’re mine, all these memories, all these failures, all these fuck-ups.
I stare at my drink like it’s already in me, numbing everything it touches. I want it. Fuck, I need it. I want the burn that blanks the edges and the dead space after. All I have to do is lean into the fall. God knows I’ve done it before. No one here will care. No one will stop me.
One swallow. That’s all it would take. One swallow to blunt the serrated edge of his judgment. Two and maybe I’d forget how I fumbled that pass in the first period and let their forward walk right past me for the go-ahead goal. Three and I’d stop seeing Blair’s face. Four and?—
Four, and I’d wake up tomorrow the same failure I am today.
A voice inside me whispers the usual lines. You deserve nothing tonight. You’ve already fallen as far as anyone expects.
It’s soeasyto disappear.
My hand twitches toward the drink. It would take nothing.
It would take everything I still might be.
A thin ember within me refuses to go out. It’s the memory of a life I held for a handful of breaths—steam fogging a shower door and the sound of Blair’s laugh, Hayes chirping me, the clean crack of a puck riding my blade and leaping into the top corner of the net.
But it wasn’treal. None of it is, except for the way I love him, and that’s the part that breaks me. My love was—and is—the only real thing in this whole mess, and it’s lodged in me like shrapnel. I can’t drink it away, can’t run from it, can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
One sip and I’m gone. One sip and I’m free. One sip and I’m lost again. I could fall so easily into those waters.
Light from the back-bar turns the vodka into a clear blade. Cold beads across the outside of the glass. Somewhere there’s a version of me who doesn’t need this anymore, who stopped needing it because he found something better to want.
I shove. The glass scrapes across the wood, away from me.
The bartender looks up. One eyebrow lifts, the cloth in his hand mid-swipe over the counter. His gaze flicks from the glass to my face before he gives me a small nod. He takes the drink away without a word.
The wood grain beneath my palms holds a thousand scars from nights like this one. My hands rest on the bar, empty. I curl them into fists, then release and watch blood flow back into my fingertips.
I look exactly like what I am in the reflection behind the bottles—a man hanging on by his fingernails.
But I am hanging on.
Twenty-Two
Tape tears between my teeth,and I wind it around my stick blade in the same pattern I’ve used since juniors—three wraps at the heel, diagonal across, back to the toe. Someone’s playlist thumps through a portable speaker. I’m half-dressed, compression shorts and nothing else, when Blair walks past my stall without stopping. His eyes slide over me like water over stone. My stomach clenches hard enough that I have to breathe through it, count to four, let the air out slowly.
